When Ronald Reagan was first elected U.S. president, his popularity inspired dozens of articles on his lifestyle. What he ate for breakfast. What, if anything, he drank. The trays of Jelly Bellies he kept on his desk and would regularly grab a handful of, saying it gave him “energy” (the term “sugar high” was not yet in vogue). His gym workouts, his swimming, his clearing brush at his Santa Barbara ranch.

A lot of people liked him so it was understandable that they wanted to know more about him. But then it turned funny: some businessmen I knew started to keep Jelly Bellies on their desks, to dress like Reagan, to shellac their hair in a similar style. I'm not sure if they grew tumbleweeds on their property, the better to clear, but I wouldn't doubt it.

You couldn’t blame them for wanting to adopt some of the president’s visual qualities. The comedy lay in their expectation that by copying some of the superficial aspects of a man (whose critics called superficial through and through), they would somehow take on his magnetism, charm and commendable waistline. Worse, they thought that soon thereafter they’d become beloved and respected leaders.

I never wanted to emulate a president — but as a young man, I certainly wanted to be Ernest Hemingway.

I lived in Long Beach but would pretend I was Hemingway in the Paris of his posthumously published memoir, “A Movable Feast.” He raved about the pastry and the Champagne; I ate doughnuts and drank Ripple pear wine, which was all that I could afford on my student loan(s). Both of us liked to box but weren’t very good at it and we each married for the first time in our early 20s.

Hemingway grew a beard so I did, too. He typed dialogue but hand-wrote his descriptions and exposition — and so did I, until it upset a linotype operator at the newspaper where I worked. She couldn’t decipher my penmanship and refused to see me as the second coming of Hemingway. (For young readers: These days, what a reporter types into his computer is pretty much what feeds into the newspaper or posts online after the editors have a go at it. Nobody retypes the entire thing, so you have to make your own typos.)

Well, I never wrote like Hemingway. It didn’t matter what he ate or drank, how he dressed or whether he used a Number 2 pencil. He was him. And I, for better or worse, was me.

As for Pres. Reagan: he was the personification of lightning in a bottle. Every time I see a politician hyping himself as the “next” Reagan, I feel like sending the guy a note reminding him that Reagan wasn’t the “next” anybody — and that was a key to his success.

By the way, I didn’t vote for him. I’d tell you more but I see that it’s time to get my hair shellacked.